nd a queer
instinctive delicacy and a tenderness due to her weakness and the memory
of how he had found her, she might just as well have been a man, or a
child like himself.

Another thing that struck her forcibly was the sense of his good humour.
His mind seemed to possess an equable warm temperature, a temperature
that it seemed impossible to lower or raise. She could not fancy him
getting angry about anything. Had she seen him as in the past during one
of his rare sprees, fighting the crowd and tossing men about like
ninepins, she would have said: 'This is not the same man'--and maybe she
would have been right.

"Where did you come from," said he one day to her as they sat rain-bound
watching the gulls dashing about over the crests of the incoming seas.

"I came from Paris--you have never been to Paris?"

No, he had never been to Paris. He knew of the place, it was in France.
Then she thought that she would interest him by trying to describe it.
She spoke of the busy streets and the great Boulevards, then she tried
to describe the people and what they were doing and then, as she talked,
it was just as though Kerguelen had become the big end of a telescope
and the doings of civilisation, as exemplified by Paris, a panorama seen
at the little end.

What _were_ they all doing, those crowds that she could visualize so
plainly?--deputies, lawyers, military men, shop-keepers, pleasure
seekers--towards what end were they going?

Then, with a strange little shock, it came to her that they were going,
as a mass, nowhere except from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn; that they
were exactly like the crowd of sea gulls, each individual rotating in
its own little orbit, and that the wonderful coloured and spangled crust
called Civilization was nothing more than the excretion of individual
ambitions, desires and energies.

Then, when she had finished her talk about the wonderful city of Paris,
she found that Raft, comfortably propped against the cave wall, was
asleep.

One of the disconcerting things about this huge creature was his
capacity for sleep. He would drop asleep like a dog at the shortest
notice and lie with his face in the crook of his arm like a dead man.
She would watch him sometimes for half an hour together as he lay like
this, and at first the vague fear used to come to her that he had been
stricken by some malady in the form of sleeping sickness that made him
act like this. She did not know that he had kept